An acquaintance of mine relayed to me an inordinately funny story yesterday. The occasion was a wedding in New Hampshire. The groom was a young man from Scotland. At the evening reception, the groom’s family from Glasgow, suitably attired in their Rangers tartan kilts, were on the dance floor shaking their sporrans to some dance floor beats. As the night nears an end the inevitable 500 Miles by The Proclaimers gets everybody on the floor followed by Auld Lang Syne then, to the horror of the visiting Presbysterians, You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Apparently the American DJ believed this to be a popular Scottish ditty. One church elder had to be taken outside and a cold compress applied.
One of my regular contributors, of both comments and Paypal support, sends me Youtube clips of this Celtic anthem by stealth. On one occasion it was being sung by a soprano. He is quick to point out that this is what this site is missing. I beg to differ and choose to demur. I’m fairly certain that he will enjoy the following reworking of The Dead Parrot sketch:
I anticipate Jim Fraser dropping by to express his faux outrage. When I receive vile comments, I quickly add the IP address of the twisted individual to the WordPress Askimet spam filter.The individual who currently refers to himself as Walter Mitty is wasting his time. His IP is in the filter and I deleted my spam file yesterday. I read no more than the first line of his virulent diatribes. Someone, long since blocked on Twitter, dropped by with a menacing threat to someone whom he assumed to be my sister. As an only child this came as news to me. This article is about threats and intimidation. Until yesterday I had no idea who Paul Larkin was. I reached out to a CFC blogger who was kind enough to send me examples of his output. I was looking for the offence that prompted Police Scotland to contact him and warn him that their intelligence dispatches had picked up a credible threat to his life. Those of a terrorist bent, who emanate primarily from Northern Ireland and towns near Stranraer, are monitored by GCHQ. Their activity does not go unnoticed. I will revert to Mr Larkin’s ‘offence‘ after reproducing an excerpt from an excellent article on this phenomenon by Alex Thomson of Channel Four. It was written on Friday 12th October 2012. A time when Charles Green’s renascent Rangers had just started their ‘ journey.’
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“An element of the Rangers customer base remains out of order and neither Rangers, nor Scotland’s football authorities, nor the police appear willing or able to do much about it.I’m talking intimidation: Of the legal profession. Of football’s governing bodies. Of football club executives. Of publishing. Of bookshops. Of newspapers. Of TV stations.Tellingly, in Glasgow this will come as news to nobody. Which should tell anybody half awake how sick things are in this singular aspect of that great city. Outside Scotland people may legitimately wonder how or why this is tolerated? Or simply gawp in astonishment that such things go on almost daily this year. And it is arguably getting worse. Like anybody prepared to challenge or ask questions or charged with passing judgement on Rangers, both Scottish Football Association and Scottish Premier League directors have had a torrid time of it. In the case of SFA boss Stewart Regan, there were death threats. The SFA have revealed that private details of SFA directors have been published online. Incredibly, to those outside the Clyde Cauldron, the SFA boss said he’d had to speak to Counter-Terrorism police officers over the nature of the threats and the security response. This revolting behaviour from a minority continues to spike in activity when those running the game are forced to take action to try and clear up the Ibrox mess. Nobody, but nobody, should have to put up with this in the course of doing their job. But in Glasgow football it is dangerously close to being accepted as part of the job. For daring to print a factual account of the Ibrox meltdown, the publisher, Bob Smith of Frontline Noir, speaks of having to deal with a catalogue of abuse. Material was published online to identify where at least one person lived who worked on the production of ‘Downfall’. The abuse I received for simply writing the forward to this factual account of the Ibrox debacle was routine for me – for publishers unused to it, the experience was frightening. Those outside Scotland will find this hard to credit, but several shops including major chains like Waterstones and WH Smith were unable to display the book openly in some shops because of reported threats and actual abuse of staff. In at least one store copies were ripped up. In another Glasgow shop an angry individual wearing a Union Jack repeatedly entered the bookshop to scream at staff to send the offending tome back to the publishers.
NUJ officials say currently around 25 journalists have been threatened recently for attempting to tell the truth about Rangers.
Understandably most feel they cannot discuss it openly. As one told me in a Glasgow hotel this summer: “I’m not paid enough and I don’t feel I have bosses who’d back me up if it came to it.”
Silence…hoping it will all go away…totally understandable when you live in Glasgow. But it isn’t going away, is it?”
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I added the blue bold italic typeface for emphasis. When Imran Ahmed went on the lam to Pakistan, he complained that he would not receive a fair trial in Scotland as Rangers is perceived by many to be a religious sect. There is a delicious irony in the fact that he chose Pakistan, a country noted for corruption, to thwart the efforts of what he perceived to be a force of corrupt ‘blue meanies.‘ The officers from Police Scotland who unsuccessfully attempted to arrest Ahmed, and illegally detained his six alleged co-conspirators, were all staunch Rangers men. As someone who dabbles at being a wordsmith, I’m attracted to words like staunch, loyal and committed as they are the apposite adjectives of choice used by many lazy journalists when discussing Rangers. I have been in many a social setting where on being introduced to a friend of a friend I would be reassured: ‘You’ll like Jim, he’s a staunch Rangers man.‘
I chose the reworking of the Dead Parrot sketch as a preface to the following clip from the pen of John Cleese and Connie Booth, which was performed by both in their award-winning comedy, Fawlty Towers:
The author of ‘Downfall,’ which is a work of non-fiction, is none other than Phil Macgiollabhain. He was sufficiently gracious to drop by this site on Monday to add his words of encouragement on the occasion of this site’s first anniversary. The publisher of his book, who refers to himself as Bob Smith Walker on Twitter, referred to this site as ‘excellent’ on the same day. I thank both for their support and in the highly unlikely event that I were to be nominated for an award at the FBA, I would not hesitate to introduce myself to Phil Macgiollabhain whom I voted for in the ‘influencer‘ category. I would not boycott the event in protest at his inclusion as was the case last year with Gersnet.
I have spent a year running this site. I know how difficult it is to do so. I have a natural empathy to those who run other popular sites, my peers. This site will always be inclusive of insights and comments from other sites, no matter their stripe. I, like many others, laugh out loud at The Clumpany when he takes what passes for the press in Scotland to task. His Liquidation Lies Cup Tournament was a satirical masterpiece. I have voted for him in The Social Football Account category of the FBA. Last year I voted for him in the New Blog category. I would like to vote for some Rangers-facing sites but it would be unconscionable to vote for sites which openly advocate pejoratives such as Tarriers, Taigs and Bheasts and the type of Anglo-Saxon adjectival epithets that are favoured by Joey Barton.
My peers and I must endure the vile threats, and the questions of those close to us who know that we devote thousands of hours to these sites with only a trickle of contributions by way of recompense. I was encouraged to give up and rest on what passes for my ‘literary laurels.’ However I listened to those who wrote to me via Paypal from North America to Australia who value this site. I will do my utmost not to disappoint them. At least in the short-term.
Mr Larkin is a published author of a number of Celtic-leaning tomes. He pens a blog called The Front of The Bus. He is also the writer and director of a documentary which has the title: The Asterisk Years. I took the time to watch this documentary. I also read a review of it which goes by the name of The Edinburgh Establishment v Celtic.
Readers of this site will know that I have long suspected that Sir David Murray worked in concert with his Edinburgh establishment cronies at the Bank of Scotland to call in Celtic’s £2.5m overdraft in 1994. Murray was not interested in Celtic’s ‘yang‘ to his Rangers ‘yin.’ Murray knew that Celtic at that time were running on fumes and empty rhetorical bluster about Swiss banks and prospective relocation to a new stadium in Cambuslang, when they barely had a pot to piss in.
As Masterton and his successors bet one billion pounds on Murray, transforming The Bank of Scotland to The Bank of Rangers, did they go out of their way to allow Rangers to have unfettered access to year-on-year UEFA participation?
However Mr Larkin goes further. He draws a parallel between Barry Bonds, the steroid-enhanced baseball star, and Rangers, the EBT-enhanced former football club which had 5 stars in their crest. If you think the SPFL’s hypocrisy in regard to Rangers continuation is as unpalatable as it is legally unsound in corporate tort, you don’t have far to look for a precedent.
The following is from The New York Times in 2014:
“Baseball’s bonfire of the hypocrisies has burned bright. This past summer, the former manager Tony La Russa, the Great Enabler, was installed in the Hall of Fame. Over two decades, La Russa pulled off a feat of nonobservation of the human condition. He oversaw the careers of the grandest hulks of the age of injectables, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, without noticing anything amiss.”
Barry Bonds was not the first hulking injectable in Baseball, but he was arguably the most successful. I respectfully invite readers to revisit my article Blame it on Rio. In this article I discuss the success of East German female athletes and systemic doping. Throwing a hammer in track and field is not a lucrative pursuit. Using a similar motion and steroids in baseball is a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
The balls hit by Bonds, many out of the ballpark, are collectors’ items. Millions of dollars can change hands for a baseball from a famous player or a famous series. In regard to Bonds, an online poll came to the conclusions that his baseballs from that time of cheating should be marked with an asterisk.
Mr Larkin argues that titles won during the DOS/VSS years and subsequent EBT years should be denoted by an asterix on the SPFL website. Quite incredibly some lunatics are prepared to murder Mr Larkin to silence him.
When I awoke this morning and logged-on, my steam-age laptop stated that it was the 21st September 2016. In 1685-1815 there was a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Did they miss a beat in 1690? Have we returned to The Dark Ages when we consider Rangers? In the more than three centuries that have elapsed since the inception of the Age Of Reason, is it reasonable to accept the assassination of an individual who truthfully asserts that Rangers cheated to win many of their historical titles and that these should be denoted by an asterisk?
Football is an entertainment, a pastime. It’s not a religion or a matter of life and death. Will those who have threatened the life of Mr Larkin also pursue the successors of René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations) the joint creators of Asterix The Gaul?
I started this article in comedy and ended it in farce, however for Mr Larkin it is no laughing matter.